


south of nowhere, north of nothing

by Anonymous



Category: Cupid - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-12
Updated: 2008-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-02 13:09:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's been moving east all his life, seeking his own sunrise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	south of nowhere, north of nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [ainsley](http://ainsley.livejournal.com) in the New Year's Resolution Challenge 2008. Posted for [14 Valentines](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/105712.html)

He's been moving east all his life, seeking his own sunrise.

When he stepped off the plane at JFK, it was almost the same time that he got on it in Chicago; the world had been suspended while he'd been borne up on air currents. He reached for his cell phone, called Claire while he was still in the terminal, accents and germs in the air around him. She wasn't home, and he felt the echo of a faint panic rasp in his lower back. He tried to convince himself it was only the remnants of the shitty airplane seat that wouldn't recline; Claire was fine, he had seen her only a few hours before and she was smiling, albeit a little shakily, he was kissing her; and it wasn't that he thought anything had happened to her, really. It was just that it could have, and he wouldn't have known. He rubbed his knuckles along the ache next to his spine, and looked for the exit.

He didn't want to go to the apartment the Times had rented for him, sight unseen; as long as he didn't let himself into a place with his name on the lease and shut the door behind him, he could fool himself that he was just visiting, him and his three favorite shirts and the silver ID bracelet Claire had given him that morning. ("It'll be warm next to your skin," she'd said, her thumb rubbing the notch in her collarbone, eyes dipping so he couldn't see her gaze. "Should've put your name on it," he told her, "If found, please return to.")

He had a guidebook, a year out of date, in the outer pocket of his carry-on, and he stepped out of the flow of people and leaned against the wall to look through it. The subway map was a tangle of colorful lines, and it took him five minutes to decide what he would do next.

Worst came to worst, he'd get lost; he had a decent sense of direction, he'd find his way home.

He didn't think about the shape of the word, the cottage-and-chimney of the h, the Hobbit-door of the o, the m that looked like a ranch house with attached garage, Frank Lloyd Wright's cantilevered e. He just headed out to Astoria, where the first thing he saw was a dead fish.

The store was happy to serve him the fish, grilled with lemon and shiny, spicy greens; like any other assignment in a strange city, he thought, as he sat at the table and tapped his pen on the first half-blank sheet of his notepad. He eavesdropped shamelessly; half the conversations around him were in a whistling language that he guessed was Greek. The restaurant was full of blue-and-white decorations, reflected endlessly in the mirror along the back wall, and there were newspaper articles tacked up behind the counter. The money, when he paid, was familiar, black and green ink on cream-colored rag paper, and the coins were the usual weight; but usually he didn't notice that.

New places always woke him up. It was cooler in New York than it had been in Chicago, the sunshine less painfully bright, but the shadows were softer, more blurred, or maybe that was the air, gritty with exhaust and exhaustion. New York is old.

But it wasn't old for Alex. He spent the afternoon wandering Astoria, for no good reason — his apartment was nowhere near there (here, he's got to stop thinking of New York as "there") and he had never been a local reporter; the brief interlude of covering for Daisy's human-interest stories had been bearable only because he was writing to Claire, writing about hope and possibility and taking risks (blind women winning lotteries, chance diagnoses of life-threatening illnesses in neighborhood clinics, purses found in cabs and returned with bronzed baby shoes inside). Then she had the sense to go on early maternity leave and he had returned, with a sigh of relief, to trying to get Walter Sisulu to give him contacts who didn't live in Johannesburg. What he would do here, he didn't know, but it was a safe bet that it wouldn't be in Astoria.

That had never stopped him before. His mom had nicknamed him Monkey when he was three, the insatiable curiosity that led him down the coast to Santa Barbara for college and then into New Mexico for his senior thesis on the Hopi making him turn all her drawers inside out and learn about condoms before his playmates even knew where babies came from. He had spent a good two years going through the Kama Sutra page by page with his girlfriends (there had been a slight problem when he broke up with Caitlin and started dating Dianna; she had been nonplussed at how many pages were checked off, and almost refused to sleep with him at all). He's picked up vials of human blood and thought who let that needle take this from them? and then gone and found out. He's always wanted to understand, to comprehend; whether he needed the knowledge, irrelevant.

It was not his body itself, but lived in the space in his body. It was tucked between his ribs and curled and cuddled up against his organs, lying sleek alongside muscle fibers. It echoed in those spaces, reverberated inside his heart.

The cure for boredom: curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity; one day it'll get him killed.

But not today.

Today, he was playing basketball with kids on sun-bleached asphalt until dark moons of sweat stained his shirt under his arms, learning the rhythm of their trashtalk.

It wasn't until the air around him began to weigh heavy on his shoulders, lactic acid bearing down his jump shot, sun tipping the continent toward Japan, that he left to plunge underground again, and emerge, like some kind of resurrection from the rat-infested world — the thing was the size of a kitten — below, onto Eighth Avenue. There was a kid with dreadlocks playing violin in the fifth subway station; he heard only a few chords before the doors shut on the platform.

The apartment was on the far side of the island; when he opened the door, he left his suitcases leaning drunkenly against each other in the foyer, jammed his hands into his pockets and stood in his living room, looking out the window at a tea-colored river. Looking west, toward Claire.

It was no surprise when it turned out that he loved New York, its tribal neighborhoods, the almost-tame pigeons, the drag queen who lived on the floor below him and called him "sugar," the whole kit and caboodle and shebang. He didn't have to go to Peru and drink yerba maté for six months, sleep on the ground in a rainstorm in the Balkans; all he had to do was spend half an hour on the subway, dredge up his pidgin Spanish, and spend Wednesday afternoons hanging out with Bittman and Asimov from Dining, pretending to know what the hell he was talking about, rating the new bottles of Beaujolais.

He didn't have to, but of course, he did anyway — he's Alex DeMouy and he always had been.

He got into a fistfight in Harlem over the Liberian soccer team, and then he wrote a piece that used that as the lead into a 500-word profile of the Liberian head coach, which got him three letters to the editor. One of them called him uno puto rubio; why, he wasn't exactly sure, and he restrained himself from calling to ask. (The Times made letter writers include their daytime phone number; he wasn't really sure that was a good idea. One of these days, he and Chris Hamre, he of the lingering bitterness over the Dodgers's departure for Los Angeles half a century ago and the deep hatred for serial commas, were going to get drunk on Bill Keller's bottom-drawer vodka and crank call not only Carmen Daly, who wrote that particular testimony to the depth of feeling that footie inspires, but Donald Trump, and abuse him for what he was inflicting on Columbus Circle.) He was pretty proud of himself, and took himself out for dinner at his new favorite hole-in-the-wall Koreatown barbeque joint, which had, in two months of eating there, never given him food poisoning.

New York hasn't killed him yet. And Trevor isn't here, which, frankly, puts it one up on everywhere west of the Appalachians. While he believes Claire when she says that Trevor's just a bit deluded, he hopes, somewhere in his lizard brain, that Trevor gets packed back to Lakeview; he may not be dangerous, but he's dangerous to Alex, to the remnants of the neanderthal Alex very carefully isn't.

He kind of likes it here.

He likes New York. He could live here; he does live here. He could wake up, walk across the island, which on some of the maps looked weirdly like a squirrel, and watch the remnants of sunrise, pale streaks of vermilion clouds over the East River (not that he does, maybe in the spring when the wind out of the Hudson River Valley is less of a bitch, but he could; options are everything). If he goes any further toward the horizon, he's gonna need a plane.

Claire was less than thrilled by this development. They were talking at cross-purposes for half-an-hour before she said, "Oh, my God, I'm making you apologize for being happy, and I'm telling you I'm sorry I miss you." There was silence on the line after she said that, until Alex got up his nerve to say, his voice gone tight, "You know, everything I've been telling you I save up, like a present. I see lightning strike the Chrysler Building, and I shut my eyes to etch the jagged shape of the electricity into my memory so I can talk to you about it later. I never would've noticed the woman jogging with the three yapping Chihuahuas if I hadn't been looking for a running path to give you, wrapped up in the promise of kisses and morning sex and I — oh, fuck, Claire," he said, and rubbed the pads of his fingertips over the thin skin of his eyelids. "New York's a great place," he managed a moment later. All she'd said was a slow wispy inhale. "The job is amazing, just as cool as I hoped it would be. I'd give them both up in a second if you asked me seriously."

He meant it; he meant it every morning when he woke up from the trucks on the West Side Highway and every night when he went to sleep, having spent the day people-drunk, noise-dazed. He made sure to. Claire didn't know — he hadn't told her — about the post-it on his coffeemaker: EVERYTHING IS TEMPORARY. EXCEPT LOVE. He didn't want to love his city or his job more than his girl.

The day he stepped onto that particular slippery slope would be the day he turned his back on the Atlantic for the shores of Lake Michigan.

Alexander Patrick DeMouy was a doubter, by taste and by training (he got his ass kicked over insufficient fact-checking once; once was enough). There were some things he would never sacrifice: a belief that Pete Rose should be banned for life, a T-shirt from the first Counting Crows concert he went to alone, the memory of seeing his byline in print. He was as much a self-contradictory mess as anyone, but he got lucky enough to kiss Claire Allen one day, and have her kiss back. He wasn't a fool.

He'd miss it, he knew that already, he would miss the pale cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson River and mysterious pink spiky fruit in Chinatown and Frank Bruni's weekly tie schedule, but he's spent his life looking for a sunrise. Since he's been here, in this city of immigrants and unfamiliar faces and brand-new neighborhoods, he's remembered his Spanish: _sonrisa_. Smile.


End file.
